US Iraq troops 'condone torture'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6627055.stm
A US survey of battlefield ethics among troops in Iraq has found widespread tolerance for torture in certain circumstances and problems with morale.
The survey, by an army mental health advisory team, sampled more than 1,700 soldiers and marines between August and October 2006.
It examined their views towards torture and the Iraqi civilian population.
A Pentagon official said the survey had looked under every rock and what was found was not always easy to look at.
The Pentagon survey found that less than half the troops in Iraq thought Iraqi civilians should be treated with dignity and respect.
More than a third believed that torture was acceptable if it helped save the life of a fellow soldier or if it helped get information about the insurgents.
Red Cross confirms Bush administration, CIA used torture in interrogations
URL Source: http://www.nworeport.com/redcross.htm
Published: Aug 8, 2007
Author: Patrick Martin
A confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) suggests that Bush administration officials may have committed war crimes in the operation of CIA “secret prisons” overseas, according to a lengthy analysis published on the web site of the New Yorker magazine Sunday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/world/americas/26cnd-canada.html
Canada Reaches Settlement With Torture Victim
By IAN AUSTEN
Published: January 26, 2007
OTTAWA, Jan. 26 — Maher Arar, the Canadian software engineer who was detained by American officials in 2002 and deported to Syria, where he was kept captive for nearly a year and regularly tortured, will receive more than 10.5 million Canadian dollars ($8.9 million) in compensation from the Canadian government, under a settlement announced today.
The settlement, which also includes an unspecified additional amount to cover Mr. Arar’s legal costs, ends a lawsuit brought by Mr. Arar and follows a recommendation from a judicial inquiry into his case. That inquiry found that the expulsion to Syria was apparently caused by false assertions made by Canadian police to United States officials, saying that Mr. Arar was linked to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Arar was pulled aside by immigration agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York as he changed planes on his way home to Montreal from Tunis. He was traveling on a Canadian passpor, but was sent instead to Syria, where he was born.
The Canadian judicial inquiry cleared Mr. Arar of any terrorism connections in September 2006, and concluded that Canadian officials had also orchestrated a smear campaign against him following his return from Syria in October 2003.
As he announced the settlement, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal apology today to Mr. Arar and his family for their “terrible ordeal.”
He also renewed calls for the United States to remove Mr. Arar from its terrorist watch list.
“Canada fully understands and appreciates and shares the United States’ concerns with regard to security,” Mr. Harper said. “However, the Canadian government has every right to go to bat when it believes one of its citizens has been treated unfairly by another government.”
Routine and systematic torture is at the heart of America's war on terror
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_23705.shtml
Published: Jan 7, 2007
Author: George Monbiot
After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.
Last week, defence lawyers acting for José Padilla, a US citizen detained as an "enemy combatant", released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk - taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.
Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for "a piece of furniture". The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for more than three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.
Bush’s Torture Ticking Time Bomb: Sins of Commission
http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/12/08/american-conservative-bushs-torturedictatorship-scandal/
Published: Dec 14, 2006
Author: James Bovard
Have Republicans become the party of torture, secret prisons, and indefinite detention? In his speech last month on signing the Military Commissions Act, President Bush declared that the bill “sends a clear message… We will never back down from the threats to our freedom.” “Rough interrogation” (a.k.a. torture) in the name of freedom may be Bush’s clearest ideological legacy.
Bush endlessly reminds listeners that “the U.S. does not torture” and that “torture is not an American value.” But “What is torture?” is the Bush version of the Pontius Pilate question. Bush appears to be using the definition of torture crafted by Justice Department official John Yoo: if detainees weren’t maimed or killed, they weren’t tortured. And the Justice Department acts as if, even if detainees are killed during interrogations, it is best to treat the deaths as harmless errors.
Rumsfeld reported to have authorised torture
http://www.radionetherlands.nl/news/international/#5093486
Published: Nov 25, 2006
The former head of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq says that outgoing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorised the torture of detainees at the prison. Former US Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told the Spanish newspaper El País that she had seen a letter signed by Mr Rumsfeld authorising interrogation methods such as sleep deprivation, making prisoners stand for long periods and the playing of music at full volume.
General Karpinski was responsible for Abu Ghraib and 16 other Iraqi prisons until the beginning of 2004, but says she had nothing to do with prison wings run by US military intelligence. She was removed from active duty after photographs of sexual intimidation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were released.
Catholic Online
http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php? id=21882
Torture violates U.S. values, human dignity, statement U.S. bishops’ prez signed says
11/3/2006
Catholic Online
WASHINGTON (Catholic Online) – Torture contradicts U.S. values and violates the dignity of the human person, says a statement from a campaign interreligious leaders joined by the head of the U.S. bishops’ conference.
“Torture Is A Moral Issue” is the title of the 79-word National Religious Campaign Against Torture “statement of conscience” signed by Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) based here and more than 20 major U.S. Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu leaders. It has also been signed by more than 10,000 individuals, according to organizers.
“Torture violates the basic dignity of the human person that all religions hold dear. It degrades everyone involved – policy-makers, perpetrators and victims. It contradicts our nation's most cherished ideals. Any policies that permit torture and inhumane treatment are shocking and morally intolerable.
“Nothing less is at stake in the torture abuse crisis than the soul of our nation. What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed? Let America abolish torture now – without exceptions,” the statement reads.
The National Religious Campaign Against Torture is an organization of 54 national, regional and local religious organizations that seeks the passage of legislation prohibiting the U.S. government from performing any torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in all circumstances, including suspected terrorists such as those held in centers like the U.S. Army Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba.
The group also opposes the practice of apprehending suspects and transporting them to countries that use torture as an interrogation technique, opposes the existence or use of secret prisons for U.S. detainees anywhere in the world, favors the restoration of habeas corpus protection for all U.S. detainees – citizen or non-citizen – and opposes the use of evidence derived from torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (including hearsay evidence) in the determination of guilt or innocence of a charged offense.
On Oct. 17, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the military to detain alien enemy combatants indefinitely with no guarantee of a hearing, leaves it up to the president to determine what constitutes torture and allows detainees to be tried in their own absence.
Cheney under attack for backing 'drowning' torture
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1935934.ece
Published: Oct 28, 2006
Author: Rupert Cornwell
The US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was at the centre of new controversy yesterday after remarks in a radio interview in which he appeared to support "water-boarding" - a torture technique banned by the Pentagon and under international law.
Speaking with a talk show host at Tuesday's "open day" on the White House lawn, Mr Cheney - long an advocate of unfettered interrogation techniques by the CIA - agreed that "a dunk in water" for terrorist suspects was a "no-brainer" if it could save lives.
The proposition was put to him by Scott Hennen, who hosts a show in Fargo, North Dakota. "Well, it's a no-brainer for me," Mr Cheney replied. "But for a while, there I was being criticized as being the Vice-President for torture. We don't torture, that's not what we're involved in."
But neither that disclaimer, nor yesterday's statement by President George Bush that "this country does not torture", satisfied human rights groups, which said Mr Cheney was endorsing water boarding - a form of torture simulating drowning.
With his comments, Mr Cheney "has issued the Bush administration's first clear endorsement of a form of torture", said Human Rights Watch. They "contradict the views of the US Congress and the US Defence Department, as well as fundamental principles of international law".
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2006/290906sexuallytorture.htm
Bush Given Authority To Sexually Torture American Children
The "horror of the shrieking boys" gets a rubber stamp from the boot-licking U.S. Congress & Senate as America officially becomes a dictatorship
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | September 29 2006
Slamming the final nail in the coffin of everything America used to stand for, the boot-licking U.S. Senate last night gave President Bush the legal authority to abduct and sexually mutilate American citizens and American children in the name of the war on terror.
There is nothing in the "detainee" legislation that protects American citizens from being kidnapped by their own government and tortured.
Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, "The compromise legislation....authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."
Similarly, law Professor Marty Lederman explains: "this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all."
We have established that the bill allows the President to define American citizens as enemy combatants. Now let's take it one step further.
Before this article is dismissed as another extremist hyperbolic rant, please take a few minutes out of your day to check for yourself the claim that Bush now has not only the legal authority but the active blessings of his own advisors to torture American children.
The backdrop of the Bush administration's push to obliterate the Geneva Conventions was encapsulated by John “torture” Yoo, professor of law at Berkeley, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, author of torture memos and White House advisor.
During a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, John Yoo gave the green light for the scope of torture to legally include sexual torture of infants.
Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
Click here for the audio.
URL Source: http://infowars.net/articles/october2007/011007Clinton.htm
Bill Clinton: "Torture Like on 24 Is OK"
America needs more Jack Bauer like agents says former President
Steve Watson Infowars.net Monday, Oct 1, 2007
Former president Bill Clinton has told NBC's Meet The Press that America needs more intelligence agents who make their own rules and engage in whatever actions are necessary like Jack Bauer from the fictional TV show 24.
"I think what our policy ought to be is to be uncompromisingly opposed to terror--I mean to torture, and that if you're the Jack Bauer person, you'll do whatever you do and you should be prepared to take the consequences... And I think the consequences will be imposed based on what turns out to be the truth." Clinton said.
"If you have any kind of a formal exception, people just drive a truck through it, and they'll say, 'Well, I thought it was covered by the exception,'" Clinton added.

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/06/09/prisoner.abuse/index.htmlReport: U.S. covered up abuse
Thursday, June 10, 2004 Posted: 0027 GMT (0827 HKT)
A hooded and wired Iraqi prisoner is shown at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq, in this undated photo.
NEW YORK (AP) -- The Bush administration "circumvented" the Geneva Convention with the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, the international advocacy group Human Rights Watch said Thursday.